We have been having some very frustrating and intermittent problems with handheld Motorola scanners losing connectivity. We have done extensive troubleshooting and are still struggling with it. Does anyone have a recommendation for a wireless consultant in the Mpls/St Paul area?

I dealt with a similar problem at a previous job and it related to the device jumping to another access point and disconnecting.

What we did to deal with it install a piece of software on the handheld that held a session on another system so that even if the handheld disconnected the session didn't quit. (If you want to know that software I would have to get back to you on that). Once we had that software working it was actually handy cause we could pretty like a VNC could see what they were doing on the handheld remotely.

We have had the same hardware and software setup for 3 years and all was working fine. We are a theater and use the scanners to validate tickets at point of entry. We have a total of 5 entry points for 3 separate theaters. One location which I will just call Aisle 2, started the problems. The two scanners at that point would either not connect or suddenly lose connection. Sometimes they would reconnect after a reboot, sometimes not. Sometimes they would just reconnect with no intervention. Normally the same scanners are are always used at the same entry points, but we did swap them out . The problem seems to be specific to that point. Since the scanners were 3 years old we replaced all of the batteries on all of the units (we have 11 scanners in all). That did no solve the problem.

We detected some access points that had been set up by other departments and made them change their channel so that it did not conflict with ours. That did not solve the problem.

It does seem that the scanners may be switching access points and failing to reconnect. Yesterday I stood at Aisle 2 with a scanner in each hand. One worked, the other didn't. A few minutes later, the working scanner failed and the other one started working. All Aisle 2 scanning is done in an area about 50 square feet.

We have been looking at the Fusion Diagnostics, but don't really know what they are telling us. We are wondering if we should make one of the access points mandatory? We usually see 3 good access points at Aisle 2.

I hope that this detail helps. Ask me any more questions, and I will try to answer. I would like the name of the software that TM_IT mentioned, if you can dig it up!